


Volume Control

by JacarandaBanyan



Series: Stony Bingo fills [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Dancing, I let Dum-E use the fire extinguisher in this one, M/M, Mentions of PTSD, PTSD, Stony Bingo, The Serum is the gift that keeps on giving, Tony listens to ear shattering music, bingo prompt, prompt, sensory issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 19:32:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14339481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Bingo prompt: SwaySteve wants to adjust to the new century, it's just that everything is so loud.





	Volume Control

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to ShinpeiHolic for reading this over and general cheerleading, and many, many thanks to Skye_wyr for betaing this and catching so many grammar issues and continuity things that I was too tired to notice.

The first time Steve had came down to the lab when Tony wasn’t expecting him, he collapsed on the floor, clutching his ears in agony before he’d made it a full foot inside. The papers he’d brought over from SHIELD for Tony to review fluttered to the ground around him and were now hopelessly out of order but he didn’t care. The pain in his ears was excruciating. He thinks he might have screamed, but it was drowned out by a pulsing, rhythmic knot of sound that seemed to be assaulting him from all sides. He knows he started crying at some point, because his tears smudged the ink on one of the papers and he had to print a replacement later.

The sound disappeared as quickly as it had hit him, only to be replaced by two loud voices arguing. 

“J, what gives? Why did you cut the music?”

“Sir, Captain Rogers appears to be in acute distress.”

“Capsicle? When did he get here?”

“Sir, I told you ten minutes ago that he was coming down.”

Steve let his trembling hands fall from his ringing ears. It was like he was back in Italy and earth-shattering explosions left you unsteady on your feet, making everything sound far away.

Then, out of the blue, a robot attacked him. A wheel pressing up against his ribs was all the warning he got before something large and heavy tried to wheel over his chest. He panicked and lashed out instinctively. His fist connected with metal and all of a sudden a robot with a giant, rotating claw where its head should be was collapsing on him.

The claw swung wildly as it fell, like the robot was panicking too, and Steve had the passing thought that perhaps it had been running from the awful sound too, and hadn’t meant to attack him. It crashed down onto a bench of some sort, sending tools and coffee cascading across the lab floor, and then all at once the noise stopped.

“Dum-E what are-- Oh Jesus, Cap, what are you doing down there? You okay?”

Steve cautiously uncurled. “What was _that_ , Tony?”  
“What was what?”His voice had dropped from _concerned friend_ to _avenger at the ready_.

“That noise! I don’t know what was making it, but it was so… so… what?” 

Tony’s lips quirked. “You mean the music? You really are an old man.”

His stomach sank. Ah. He was the butt of some joke, then. He’d hoped that maybe they could recover from their eventful first meeting, but perhaps it wouldn’t be as simple as that. He tried to hide his face by turning to right the machine he knocked down, but he must not have been fast enough because Tony immediately started backtracking. 

“Not that that’s a problem, everyone around here has a few screws loose, don’t sweat it.” His voice was a strange mix of sheepish and defensive. “Now, what are these for?”

He bent down and picked up one of the papers. After scanning it briefly, he made a face like a cat that had stepped in a puddle and dropped it on top of the pile by Steve’s ankle. Steve reached for a piece of paper that was just a little bit out of reach, so his arm would hide his blush. 

“You can tell Fury I’m not making suits for anybody but myself.” He paused, winced, then tacked on, “Maybe Rhodey, and possibly Pepper; but not any random SHIELD agent that wants one.”

Steve was pretty sure his face was under control by now, so he risked looking him in the face. 

“I don’t think he really expected you to agree.”

“Smart man.”

The conversation caught briefly, uncomfortably. The pause after those words was just a bit too long. Steve wanted to fill it, but none of the thoughts fluttering around in his head like flashy, distracting butterflies were things he wanted to say to Tony. 

The distressed robot from before came to his rescue, for a given value of ‘rescue.’ One moment his blush was spreading like a prickly weed across his cheeks and neck, and the next he had a face full of flame-retardant foam. Somewhere to his left, he heard triumphant beeping. 

“No, Dum-E, you- you’re worse than useless, is what you are. No, he wasn’t on fire! There’s no fire, I didn’t even put you on fire duty, you useless hunk of bolts. Apologize to Steve.”

He was still wiping foam out of his eyes, so he couldn’t really look and see if the robot was repentant or not, but the string of beeps he heard sounded sincere enough, so he accepted the apology.

“No worries. Did the papers survive?”

Tony paused suspiciously before replying. Steve was almost certain he was hurriedly rubbing foam all over the forms. 

“Yep, what a disaster. I really should just upgrade him, if it weren’t for him we could have sat down and gone through all these boring papers instead of getting you caught up on what’s happened in music while you were napping. Honestly Cap, ‘that noise?’ I’d be offended on behalf of the rock gods if you were anyone else…”

Tony babbled a lot. Since it gave him a chance to get his thoughts together, Steve decided that that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps he could still salvage this.

 

* * *

 

Later, when they kiss for the first time, it’s like all the sound has been drained from the world. It’s such a nice, light feeling, like he’s been unburdened. After that, he tries out a new strategy for visiting Tony in the workshop; whenever he’s down there, he makes sure he’s kissing some part of Tony. It’s a very popular strategy with both parties, but sadly not really a practical one.

Back to square one.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Steve just lies awake and listens to the whirring and water gushing that he can never escape. He doesn’t know how everyone else stands it; back in the 40s you couldn’t hear the plumbing, so why is it so loud after years of technological advancement? Was it some sort of fad?

His spine would stiffen up when a siren sounded outside, and wouldn’t loosen again for at least ten minutes. Sometimes he heard people moving around on the floors beneath him. He tried to cover his ears with his pillow so he wouldn’t hear their conversations, but to no avail. 

It was better when Tony slept with him. He could focus on Tony’s heartbeat and the quiet, calming sound of the arc reactor. Tony’s warmth made him unstiffen faster and fall asleep sooner. Sometimes he had nightmares, but that was okay. Steve got them too sometimes. Sometimes Tony suggested Steve come sleep with him on the enormous couch down in the workshop, but Steve always had to refuse. It made him feel like a heel, but the prospect of all that sound made him remember how lucky he was to have the room that he did, where the sounds were all relatively quiet.

It was okay if Tony couldn’t always sleep with him. He’d just hold him all the tighter when he could.

 

* * *

 

 

Tony is always swaying to loud, eardrum shattering music when Steve comes down to see him. 

Tony swore up and down that he’d soundproofed the lab to within an inch of its life, that not a single sound should be able to escape it now, but Steve could still hear the melody of whatever he was listening to on any given day just fine. More often than not he could feel the bassline in the tips of his toes and the patch of skin behind his left ear that had always been sensitive to vibrations. 

“But you’ve got the serum, Steve, you don’t count! I bet you can hear my heartbeat from two rooms away.”

“Or maybe you could just turn the music down a little.”

“Nope, sorry, terrible idea, absolutely can’t do it. I work best when my body thinks it’s under glorious, glorious attack. Hence my coffee and my music.”

Steve sighed and closed his eyes. Tony, he reminded himself, was not only a grown man capable of making his own decisions, but the owner of the Tower. If he wanted to listen to music so loud it made the lab’s windows vibrate, that was his choice. Steve could make as many suggestions as he wanted, as pointed as he wanted, but he couldn’t lose it on Tony. That wouldn’t be fair or mature.

“I just think you’re going to hurt your ears if you keep the volume up high like that.”

But just like always, Tony brushed him off. 

“Sometimes I look at that frankly glorious example of the benefits of science Erskine gave you, and I forget you’re such a grandpa. Don’t let the media hear you complaining about volume, or before you know it every other news story will be on how young people are blowing out their ears or about how loud sounds cause depression or something, and then an army of middle schoolers will take to twitter to yell about how they don’t care and I’ll have to be right there with them and before you know it there will be memes, Steve, memes, and I know you don’t take advantage of the modern miracle that is the internet but the rest of us practically live there and we won’t be able to escape the memes…”

And so on and so on. Tony could run his mouth for miles over the smallest thing. Steve wondered if he did it so people wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgewise and ask him questions he didn’t want to answer. It made him sad to think that Tony was talking to him the way he’d talk to an over-enthusiastic reporter or nosy gossip, but he remembered his own time in the spotlight too well to harp on him for it. 

Instead, he sat and waited for Tony to run out of steam and wondered why everything in the 21 century had to be as loud as possible. 

Once Tony’s cascade of words at last came to a halt, he tried a different tactic. 

“If your music is always that loud, then I can’t come see you down here.”

He knew immediately that he’d chosen wrong. 

“Are you trying to guilt trip me, Steve? I never would have thought it of Captain America, but I guess it just goes to show that nobody’s perfect and all that.” His words were light, but something in Tony’s eyes was not. “Seriously though, the ‘do this or we can’t be together’ schtick? Not interested. Many have tried, Cap, many of them much more ruthless manipulators than you could ever be. I don’t fall for shit like that anymore.”

Steve wanted to start wildly backtracking, but he wasn’t sure how Tony had arrived at the manipulation angle in the first place. He couldn’t stay silent though, so he plowed ahead uncertainly. 

“That’s not what I meant, Tony. I’d never try and do, do  _ that _ to you. What I meant was that I can’t be down here when it’s so loud. I don’t know how you can stand it, but it’s physically painful for me.”

Tony blinked, then suddenly shifted so he was much closer. He studied Steve intensely. “Is it just the music that’s painful, or has sound in general been a problem for you lately?”

Steve shrugged. “Everything, but music is something you can turn down. You can’t turn down the water in the pipes, or the cars, or all those blaring alarms. Everything sounds like a warzone.”

“You’re saying everything sounds like World War II?”

“It’s probably the thing that’s gotten to me most since coming out of the ice. I just can’t seem to escape it. But no matter who I talk to, they always brush me off. How hard is it to just turn the volume down a little?” That last bit might have been a bit more of a whine than he wanted, but he was getting to the end of his rope. 

Tony kept looking at him like he was looking for something, but for the life of him Steve didn’t know what it was he was looking for. Eventually, understanding spilled across his face.

“Hey J, let Bruce know we’re coming up to his lab. I wanna test a theory.”

 

* * *

 

Steve looks around and catalogues the differences between Tony’s workshop and Bruce’s as Tony ushers him into a chair. While Bruce’s is still plenty loud ( _ machines beeping incessantly, making unease slither like a venomous snake down his spine, whirring sounds he can’t identify because he can’t see any fans in the room but he’d swear that was what he was hearing, water gushing through the pipes like the room was about to flood at any moment, people talking like they’re whispering, but who whispers loud enough to be heard across the room? _ ), it’s not nearly as loud as Tony’s lab. The absence of loud music is welcome.

“Tell me again, Steve, how long have you been having problems with sound?” Bruce asks as he searches through a drawer full of instruments. He pulls out one about the size of a Pez dispenser, then one the size of a large popsicle. 

“As soon as I woke up from the ice. Well, everything was pretty loud during the war, but that was  _ war _ , it doesn’t really count.” He amends. Bruce hums noncommittally. 

“Did you have auditory difficulties all throughout the war, just while you were deployed, or was there some other starting point?”

Steve tried gamely to ignore that Tony was bouncing in his seat just outside Steve’s field of vision, but it was difficult when the sound of the seat creaking each time he moved was too obnoxious to ignore. 

“Well, boot camp wasn’t too bad, but the USO tours were kind of disorienting. I hadn’t realized a crowd could get that loud when they were all worked up, and of course I was pretty close to the speakers, so that doesn’t really count. Then in Europe it was loud all the time. It made it hard to sleep, in the beginning.”

Bruce nodded in that distracted, noncommittal way doctors did when they were ignoring what you said and trying to mine individual words for meaning. 

“Okay, I’m going to hold this up near your ear,” he said, lifting the popsicle-sized one for Steve to get a good look at, “and I’m going to shine a light in you ear. You might hear some sounds; if you do, raise your right hand.”

Almost immediately Steve’s heard a quiet high-pitched sound. At least this thing was turned down to a sensible volume. He raised his hand.

Bruce looked startled, and Tony started vibrating faster, like he was keeping a flood of science babble pent up inside him and trying to escape. 

“You can put your hand down once you no longer hear the noise, you know.” Bruce says after a few seconds. 

“I can still hear it.”

“Okay, let’s try something a little different then.”

The noise disappears and Bruce sets the instrument on the table along with the Pez dispenser one. Instead, he pulls what look like earphones only bulkier and offers them to Steve after plugging them into a device that looked like a microwave and a laptop merged together. 

“Now, tell me when the sound reaches normal speaking volume.”

They continue testing him for about an hour with different devices though Steve’s not convinced that the tests themselves are really changing much. Then they start scanning his ears and tutting over some light streaks and dark spots on the scan. It just looks like any other scan to Steve, but that was probably why he didn’t do science for a living. After that they take a scan of his entire head, then another, then another. 

Steve listens to the beeping and whirring of the machines and wonders how they can stand it. He’s only been here for an hour or two, so he won’t complain, but the unending noises from the instruments were already making him feel like he was going crazy. Tony and Bruce spent hours in the lab every day. Maybe they’d just gotten used to it. Or maybe they had gone a little bit crazy, and that was why they made such reckless decisions sometimes.

Ten minutes later, Tony disappears, then reappears with a plate covered in little heaps of different foods. He sets it in front of Steve. 

“Okay, we’re gonna keep scanning, but we want you to eat this stuff while we do.”

Steve looked down at the plate. There were some fruits (thankfully no pineapple) and nuts, some crackers, some squishy things he didn’t recognize, but also some brightly colored, sugary-looking candies. 

“I can’t eat those,” he says, pointing at them. “Everything else, sure, but those hurt my mouth.”

Tony and Bruce look at each other, then back at him. 

“How exactly does it hurt to eat them?”

“There’s too much sugar in them. If I bite them, it’s like my teeth and gums are going into shock. Then it gets on my tongue and I feel like I’m being stabbed. The first time I did that, I actually had to go check my mouth for blood, I was so convinced I’d hurt myself somehow. Just sucking on them doesn’t work either- my tongue starts to go numb and my mouth starts to feel weird and jittery after a minute. It starts to hurt after about two minutes. So I just don’t eat them.”

They stare at him. He hunches his shoulders a bit, but fights not to shrink in on himself. Instead, he keeps talking.

“Honestly, sugar was just fine before it went and changed. Sugar, salt, bananas; every time I turn around someone’s changed perfectly good food.”

“Steve,” Bruce starts, and oh God that’s pity in his voice, “I don’t think sugar or salt has changed since you went under. You’re right about the bananas, but processed sugar shouldn’t hurt your mouth.”

Tony pipes up from behind him. “What about pineapple? Does that hurt too?”

“How did you know?” Was Tony watching him eat? He knew there were cameras throughout the house, but he thought they were passive. Stupid, stupid, of course someone was watching him. What else had they seen? Who else was watching? What-

Tony rested a hand on his shoulder, and he leaned into it instinctively. The feel of his fingers lightly squeezing grounded him a bit against the sudden tidal wave of suspicion and fear. Where had that come from? Of course Tony wasn’t spying on him. He was being silly.

“Relax, honey. We’re just testing a theory out here. Are there any other foods that hurt to eat?”

Steve starts listing foods that he suddenly couldn’t eat, then foods that he could eat but didn’t like to anymore because the taste had changed, then foods that he didn’t used to like but did now that they had more taste. He eats some of the nuts and fruit while he talks. He has to spit some of the crackers out because of the salt, but neither of them seem offended by his terrible manners.

Finally, after they’ve put away all of their instruments and put away the scanners, they look at each other, then turn to look at him in unison. 

“Steve,” Bruce says, “You know how it says in your file that the Serum enhanced your eyesight?”

“Yes?”

“Well, we think that wasn’t the only sense that got enhanced. Nothing has gotten louder, Steve, your ears just work much better than they rightfully should. Food hasn’t changed, you’re just tasting it so much more strongly than you were before the serum. Based on the scans we did, you’re smelling things much more strongly too.”

“Not to worry, though!” Tony breaks in, “I’ve already thought of a solution to the hearing thing, it should be ready by tomorrow or the day after.” He hops up onto Steve’s lap and wraps his arm around his shoulder. “It’ll be alright, Steve. I promise.”

Steve’s shoulders droop and he releases his posture a little bit. He tells himself it’s not in defeat. He wraps his arm around Tony in return and squeezes.

 

* * *

 

Later, when they’re laying half on top of each other in bed and Steve’s ears are trained on Tony’s heartbeat and the whir of the arc reactor, Tony speaks again. 

“Hey Steve?”

“Mmm?”

“Have you… considered seeing a therapist? SHIELD has a couple on call.” Steve can hear his heartbeat  _ thump-thump-thumping _ like a rabbit’s foot and a minute shift in the tone of the arc reactor’s whine. He pulls Tony closer into his chest, so that there’s a long, unbroken line of contact from where Tony’s cheek is squished against his chest down to their thighs. 

“I can’t say that I have.”

“ _ Would  _ you consider it? Even if it was just for a few meetings?”

Steve focuses on keeping his breathing even. 

“Any particular reason why?”

Tony squirmed further on top of him, completely messing up the blankets on the way. 

“Well, earlier, when we were doing all those brain scans,” he whispers, and when did he start whispering around Steve? He shouldn’t have to do that, it would probably take a toll on his voice before a full day had passed. But Steve was feeling sleepy and selfish just then, and he liked this lower volume. He could wait until morning to tell Tony he didn’t have to do that.

“What about the scans?” He asks lightly, focusing on the little  _ wooshes  _ Tony makes every time he takes a breath. 

“They were lit up in all sorts of places they shouldn’t have been. And I’m not that sort of doctor, and more importantly neither is Bruce, and I shouldn’t try and diagnose you when I definitely am not qualified, have no desire to become qualified, my own mind causes me enough problems as it is- that’s beside the point. The point is, my second guess after ‘the Serum is the gift that keeps on giving’ was PTSD, and nothing in any of the tests we ran really gave us any evidence against it.”

Steve focused on not squeezing the arm around Tony’s waist any harder than he already was.

“I mean, you haven’t been sleeping so great, and you sometimes seem all tense, like you’re waiting for something bad to happen, and then today in the lab you said everything had been loud since the War, and there’s only so many places I can go with those data points.”

Steve fixes the blankets Tony messed up so they lay nicely across them both.

“And hey, maybe I’m wrong and you’re perfectly fine, but a couple of sessions can’t hurt, right? Steve? Can you say something for me?”

“Who would have to know?” If Tony’s whispering, then he can whisper too.

“Hardly anybody. The therapist. Probably Coulson, but not necessarily Fury. I’ll take a look at the official policy in the morning.”

“Okay.”

 

* * *

 

Through the workshop windows he could see Tony swaying excitedly to that loud band he liked so much. Steve always had to bite his tongue to keep from telling Tony that it sounded like metal falling down an endless flight of stairs. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that Steve’s ears never got the chance to adjust to seven decades worth of new musical styles, but that didn’t stop him from feeling bitter about it sometimes. 

He’d been getting that feeling a lot lately. He tried to stay positive, especially where other people could see, and he’d made progress. He ran every morning, whether he was in DC or New York. That was something normal, happy people did these days, right? The parks were full of joggers. There were always smiling, happy people in running clothes in those too-bright too-loud ads on TV for medicines that if the off screen narrator was to be believed were the Serum all over again. He’d been slowly bonding with Natasha and Sam. Maybe it would have gone faster if he could text them like everyone else seemed to, but just holding a cell phone made his confidence plummet through the floor. Still though, friends. New bonds to tether him to this time. 

And if sometimes in the drowsy, honest minutes between wakefulness and sleep he thought that might be a mistake, well, it was easy to drown out your own thoughts in this loud century. 

The vibrations made the glass whine so awfully that little shudders ran down his spine, but he ignored it. No one else could hear it. He focused instead on the appealing way Tony swayed with his whole torso so that the eye naturally slid down the line of his shoulders, over his ribs to his hips. 

He had a boyfriend. If that wasn’t getting better, then he didn’t know what was. 

He wanted to slip inside and wrap his arms around Tony from behind, startle him and make him laugh and try to turn and look at him. He wanted to be so close, their bodies made one unbroken line of contact from collar to hip, and then he wanted to sway together. He wanted that dance he’d been promised decades ago.

But if he could hear the music so clearly out here, if it was loud enough to vibrate the thick glass windows, then how hard would his ears ring inside the workshop itself?

Tony hadn’t noticed him yet, so he could just hover here a little longer. Watch Tony sway back and forth. It looked like he was trying to teach Dum-E how to do it, with mixed results. The bot that had run Steve over back when he’d first met it had proved an endearing, if clumsy presence since then. Sometimes the bot would swing it’s claw around wildly, and Tony would have to race over and stop it from knocking over something important. It’s main body didn’t seem to want to sway correctly, but Tony just kept demonstrating again and again.

Maybe Tony was right about seeing somebody.

Finally, Tony looked up and saw him. The music quickly subsided, and the glass stopped quivering. He smiled and waved at Tony, who was frantically digging though the mess on his workbench. 

The doors opened to grant him access and Steve could hear Tony clearly. “Stay right where you are, Cap, I’ve got something for you. You’re gonna love it, just give me a sec…  _ here _ we go!”

He pulled two small, round devices from under an overturned cup. 

“I was going to wrap them, but then I saw you standing there and I thought, why don’t I just give them to you now? Then you can hang in the workshop with me, help me teach Dum-E how to dance, and I can have music playing and won’t have to whisper. Here, stick them in your ears like earphones, then squish them in there a little bit harder. They should mould to the shape of your ear and stick there.”

Steve took them and followed along with Tony’s instructions. The devices felt kind of weird, like he was sticking warm pudding in his ear. Once he took his fingers away though, they remained in place. 

All of a sudden he realized the world had gone quiet. 

He couldn’t hear the water rushing through the pipes or the whir of Tony’s various computers and scanners. He couldn’t hear anything but Tony’s voice and Dum-E’s mechanical joints moving as the claw on its head rotated curiously. It was like his ears were normal again.

Tony was still talking, something about testing and possible bugs but Steve didn’t care. His ears weren’t hurting anymore. He grabbed Tony by the waist and spun him around in the air.

“Thank you Tony, thank you, it’s back to normal!”

He let Tony fall against his chest and hugged him as hard as he thought Tony could comfortably take, then kissed him. He felt Tony gesturing awkwardly behind his back, and then the music started up again, but this time it didn’t pierce his skull. Everything was warm and almost perfect.

He set Tony down on his feet, but kept him close.

“Dance with me,” he sighed. 

Of course, that’s when the alert goes off and JARVIS informs them that they need to suit up.

“After,” Tony promises, after being engulfed by the armour he gives Steve one last kiss before he shuts the faceplate. “After this, we can come back here and dance as much as you want. So much has happened to music since you went on ice, you’ll love it.”

 

* * *

 

Steve’s leg felt oddly distant, like it was only attached to him rather than part of him. The cloth of his uniform was slashed wide open around his right thigh, and something warm was trickling from his lower back and soaking the material so that it clung to his skin. His ears were ringing from the din of the battle, but the horrible not-deafness was receding. That was good. The battle was probably over, if it was quiet enough for that. No crashes, no screams, no shouting from the coms- though he could start to hear some sirens, although it still sounded as if he was hearing them from under water. 

Tony’s voice came from somewhere above him, but he couldn’t quite make out what he was saying yet. That was okay though. He was alive, Tony was alive, and everything was okay. They could still have that dance. 

This time he wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip away.

It hurt to bend his back too much, but he needed to use his core muscles to get to his feet if he didn’t want to hurt his thigh more than it already was. Tony’s distant voice picked up speed sharply, but he still couldn’t hear what he was saying. The sirens were getting louder, though. Did they really need to be that loud? Come to think of it, they probably  _ did  _ have to be that loud if they wanted to compete with everything else for people’s ear. 

He felt Tony put his gauntlet on his shoulder, felt some downward pressure, but he kept struggling to his feet. Tony didn’t have the Serum. He didn’t know how fast he could recover. He’d be fine so long as he could get on his feet and start dancing. 

“ _ Steve, Steve, that’s not a good idea, you’re bleeding everywhere, SHIELD medical is coming but they’ll come to you, you don’t have to go to them-” _

Ah, perfect, there was Tony’s voice. It was still pretty far away, but that was okay. 

He put a hand on Tony’s shoulder, half to support himself and half to make sure he didn’t go anywhere. His hand fit comfortably between two plates. The armor’s visor was tipped up, and Tony was looking at him with big, blown-wide eyes. After the dance he’d have to bully him to medical and make sure he was alright. Tony sometimes hid battle injuries, after all.

“Tony,” he heard himself say, “Will you dance with me?” 

Tony’s face scrunched up adorably, and his head tipped like he was confused. But why would he be confused? They’d agreed, after the fight they’d have their dance. 

“Steve what are you talking about, your leg is gushing blood, you can’t dance right now. You shouldn’t be moving that leg at all.”

Huh. That would make dancing harder, but not impossible. They’d just have to settle for something a little simpler for now, have the fancy dance later. They could definitely have more than one dance.

For now though, they could just sway a little, like the couples in the movies did during slow dances in crowded rooms when they just wanted to forget that anybody in the world existed but them.

He tried to tell Tony this, but Tony still looked skeptical, so he wasn’t sure he explained it right. 

Instead of trying again, he carefully put the hand that wasn’t on Tony’s shoulder around his waist and pressed up against his chest. The metal was a bit uncomfortable, sure, but Steve wasn’t really feeling things the way he normally did right now. Everything felt far away enough to ignore. Tony copied him, so he must have gotten the point. Or maybe he was trying to help support his weight. Either way, they were ready now. 

Steve began to sway them a little. His left leg seemed fine, so he shifted most of his weight onto that one and pivoted on it slowly, so that he and Tony could sway-dance in a little circle. 

On their third time around, he let his head fall against the chestplate. It felt soothingly cool against his skin. Tony was dancing with him properly now, rather than being led. His hearing had mostly returned, and he could hear their teammates talking nearby, but it felt unimportant when he was finally dancing with Tony.

Something warm and soft was settling in his chest as they swayed. For the first time since getting the Serum and plunging into his duties as Captain America, he felt at peace.

 

* * *

 

Steve rounds the corner to the workshop just in time to see the windows crack, then shatter. Glass rains down, catching the light as it falls. From where Steve’s standing, it looks like Tony got showered in glitter. The thumping music shuts off before the last of the glass reaches the floor, but Steve still has a pretty good idea of what probably happened.

He hears the paper plate he was carrying hit the floor with a dull thud as he sprints over to Tony. Part of him starts yelling about enemy fire and running out in the open, but he shuts that part down. He’ll talk about it later at his newly-mandated therapy sessions, he says to himself. Another part of him screams about wasting food, but he shuts that one up too. He probably won’t mention that one to the therapist. His injured leg slows him down a bit, but it’s mostly healed since yesterday.

Tony seems to be fine, aside from some shallow gashes. His hands are probably the most hurt, from where he instinctively tried to brush little bits of glass out of his hair. Still, he’s bleeding and it sets Steve on edge. 

He skids to a stop just before reaching the lab proper and starts picking his way across the floor. He’s only wearing socks, and it won’t do any good if both he and Tony are bleeding. He is absently grateful that he was wearing the plugs Tony gifted him. 

Tony turns and looks at him sheepishly. 

“So maybe you had a point about the music being a little too loud, but in my defense -”

“It’s okay, Tony. Let’s just clean this up. Then we can go head upstairs and get you bandaged up.”

Tony suddenly looked even more sheepish. 

“Why go all the way upstairs, I have plenty of first aid stuff down here! You know, accidents happen, and all that. It’s just proper lab safety. There is absolutely no need to lend any credence to Bruce and his ‘you’ll hurt your ears if you keep the music that loud, Tony’ and ‘don’t you keep up with the literature on how that affects your ears, Tony?’ Nope, there is absolutely no need to let everyone else know I actually shattered a window with the force of AC/DC and cut myself on the glass.”

“Okay Tony. If you say so. Let’s just get this cleaned up.”


End file.
